1.6.2-Aphraseremains
Brick!Club 1.6.2 The honesty of Javert This is an excellent chapter. Poor Champmathieu! I feel so bad for him. Four different people all identify him as this man who he knows nothing about, he has no one who can say that he didn’t spend nineteen years in prison (which is a terrifying thought, and yet not surprising for the same reasons Javert doesn’t find the disappearance of the Valjeans surprising: “Families of that class quite commonly vanish from sight – when they aren’t mud they’re dust” – which is a horrifying statement all on its own), and his incomprehension is taken as a clever ploy to throw off suspicion. Seriously, Javert takes his total bewilderment not just as unconvincing but as a sign that he must be Jean Valjean! And the whole bewildering chain of logic about his name! (I actually really love the whole ‘Jean Mathieu’ -> ‘Chan Mathieu’ -> ‘Champmathieu’ explanation, but it is still pretty damn tenuous.) Javert is pretty great though. I don’t like the guy, but he is an excellent character. He’s not a hypocrite, he genuinely applies his own views of justice to himself and understands what a problem it would be if he did not (and I have a whole bunch of incomplete thoughts about self-judgment in this book, and how people who are presented as virtuous are carefully shown to accept their own guilt and the punishment it should bring with it, even as the narrative is making the larger point that it’s not their fault but society’s and their punishment is beyond anything they could deserve. But I don’t know how to articulate those thoughts yet, so I won’t try here). But there’s this fundamental conflict between Valjean and Javert, that they both have these sort of universal codes, but Valjean’s is more what was referred to earlier as “the charity which understands and pardons”, the standard that he wants applied to himself (the standard the Bishop showed him), which he applies to Javert too even when he could be getting him out of his hair, and Javert’s is this particular uncompromising and unforgiving idea of justice. “It’s easy to be kind; the hard thing is to be just” – that’s such a great line, and it says so much, about who Javert is and how he views Valjean’s “indulgence” which he finds so exasperating both when applied to others and to himself, because it’s so contradictory to everything he believes. Valjean wants to help people in the face of society because he knows how society as a whole destroys people and that its standards are not fair; Javert is all about maintaining the social order as the ultimate good and believes that the people who transgress it are fundamentally bad - their moral codes are each other’s inverse. And, of course, this is where we are first really told who Madeleine is. Not explicitly, obviously, but we hear his name again here and we get Javert’s list of clues that the reader has presumably been noticing as well – the strength, the inquiries in Faverolles, the skill with a rifle… it’s a bit like the wrap-up on a mystery novel, honestly, except that the detective is explaining how he came to what he believes to be the wrong conclusion even as the reader has to know that he was right – , it’s all enough that we know what’s going on in Madeleine’s head when he hears this. I just really really love the structure of this novel. Also, wait, how did the police find out that Valjean robbed Petit-Gervais? Even if he reported the theft, Valjean never told the kid his name, did he? Commentary Sarah1281 The kid didn’t have to report the theft. Valjean himself reported it to that priest who was wandering by. He didn’t give his name but since everyone in town knew who he was since he had reported himself to the mayor when he had first arrived (and not only would the descriptions match but everyone would assume it was him anyway) and he had already been arrested for stealing the bishop’s silver and likely no one actually believed the bishop’s denial. Everyone was always going to assume it was Valjean even if it hadn’t been. Aphraseremains (reply to Sarah1281) I had completely forgotten that Valjean did that! That makes sense.